Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/258

244 God permitted man to remain on the earth seven or eight hundred years. Then he sent one of his servants to warn him to prepare to go. The man took leave of his family, and serenely started on the journey to the other world. The legends which give the explanation of natural phenomena are, as may be imagined, extremely ingenious. Take, for instance, the Suahelian account of the ebb and flow of the tides: "An enormous fish, named Keva, lives under the sea; a great rock stands upon its back, and upon this an enormous ox with sixty thousand horns and forty thousand legs. His feet are planted on the rock, his nose rests upon the water, his hair sustains the earth. The animal breathes once a day, and as the volume of his body increases with his inspirations and diminishes with his expirations, so the level of the sea rises and falls."

African literature is very rich in fables of animals, which may be divided into the two categories of moral apologues and simple narrations. In the former such an identity is noticeable with stories of the peoples of Asia and Europe as almost to cause us to think that both proceed from a common source whence they were drawn in prehistoric times. To this may, however, be opposed the hypothesis of an original and simultaneous origin in different places; a question for the discussion of which we have not yet all the elements. One of the most brilliant of the African apologues comes from Somaliland, and is perhaps better than the corresponding European fable: "The lion, the hyena, and the fox went a-hunting, and caught a sheep. The lion said, 'Let us divide the prey.' The hyena said, 'I will take the hinder parts, the lion the fore parts, and the fox can have the feet and entrails.' Then the lion struck the hyena on the head so hard that one of his eyes fell out, then turned to the fox and said, 'Now you divide it.' 'The head, the intestines, and the feet are for the hyena and me; all the rest belongs to the lion.' 'Who taught you to judge in that way?' asked the lion. The fox answered, 'The hyena's eye."

In the second category of animal stories no hidden moral is proposed, but adventures are related corresponding to the character of the animals to which they are attributed. In Africa, as in Europe, the principal cycle is formed of what is called the Romance of the Fox; only there is no complete epic, but merely a number of isolated anecdotes, in which the hero is usually the fox, but sometimes the jackal, the hare, or the rabbit.

In the fables of the Hottentot tribe of the Nama, the jackal is directly glorified as a national hero, as the incarnation of the race of the Nama, and by his astuteness overcomes all his adversaries, first among which are the wolf and the "man of the white race." It is in place to observe here that when the primitive versions of the